Miguel Endara, the artist behind the “Hero” video, was interviewed on The Indistry:
Originally I was planning to photograph him with glass on his face, but that was difficult without a good camera and it wouldn’t get good hi-res of the skin and the pores. So I thought the only way to do that inexpensively would be to xerox it or scan it. So used my scanner to scan his face in hi-res of almost 600 dpi which provided me with immense detail.
I did so many scans that I ended up just putting them together and kind of making my own final image. So the look you have know is not of one scan, but of probably 2 or 3 scans put together.